B2B Sample Providers

A B2B market research sample provider is a company that provides key decision makers with information and insights about their clients’ business and markets that they might not have access to otherwise. In B2B market research, the samples represent companies, rather than consumers. This means sample sizes are often smaller than in B2C research, as there are fewer companies operating in a given industry than there are total consumers buying things. B2B market research has to provide the answers to sophisticated, industry-specific questions. As a result, B2B market research sample providers can’t pull their samples from panels made up of people from the general population. Sample procurement is the process of hiring a sample vendor to recruit respondents. Generally, sample vendors recruit their respondents from their preexisting panels. These are groups of people who’ve previously opted in for participation in market research. Different sample vendors specialize in different populations, so it’s important to do research before selecting a sample vendor, particularly if you need a B2B market research sample provider.

When a business hires a B2B market research sample provider, they tap into the B2B market research company’s existing network of experts that have already been vetted and filtered for potential fraud. All of the B2B research sample providers are independent, meaning they are not affiliated with any specific business or product. They do not have an incentive to get results that are favorable to either company or product.

Factors to consider before hiring a B2B sample provider

1. What survey tools do they use? Do they have the functionality required to meet the needs of your business question? Different B2B market research sample providers use different sampling tools. It’s essential to pick the provider whose tools best meet your requirements. Consequently, it’s very important to identify what your requirements are  before you hire a B2B market research sample provider. These requirements could be how large a sample you need, what kinds of professionals you need to talk to, etc.
2. What’s the per respondent cost? What’s the cost of additional follow up surveys with select respondents? Knowing the answers to these questions prior to hiring your sample provider lets you make wise fiscal decisions. You have to weigh the cost of a respondent against the probability of the respondent providing you with useful data.
3. How do they filter for qualification and fraud? How rigorous is their screening process? Unfortunately, fraud and bad data are common in B2B market research. It’s often too easy for an unqualified respondent to sneak into a panel. For instance, a med student might impersonate an experienced doctor.
4. What’s their policy on including identifying information for the sample respondents? Much of the time, the panels sample providers use have confidentiality agreements. Some B2B research may require some identifying information about respondents. For instance, if you are doing competitive benchmarking, you may need to talk to former or current employees of your competitor.
5. Do they offer any sort of lower commitment field test at a lower cost engagement? Doing this can help see if the B2B market research query is properly positioned to extract useful information. Before committing to a large-scale survey, it can be valuable to first do a test run. It helps to make sure your line of questioning is on the right track.

Why is it a good idea to hire a B2B sample provider?

B2B market research sample providers can be a great value to businesses because they often provide access to much larger databases than the business may be able to access on its own. B2B market research companies typically have access to a vast library of secondary research from work that they’ve done with previous clients. They may have their own researchers who have written up the research from scratch. They also may have found a third-party source of information that they can access on behalf of their clients. In either case, they’re able to provide the business with a great deal more market research data than it would be able to get on its own.

There are a few ways in which B2B market research sample providers can help businesses. One of the most obvious is in offering access to a database of contacts. A good B2B market research sample provider will have a database of more than just primary sources. It will also have a database of secondary sources from other companies that it can provide to its clients. This will allow the business to get in touch with people who are already familiar with the products or services that it offers. This can be an invaluable source of information for startups and growing companies.

Market research sample providers also tend to offer access to a wide variety of secondary sources relating to different industry sectors and niches. A company might want some information on its particular sector. However, it might also want some information on related sectors or niches as well. A good B2B market research sample provider will be able to find the professionals to answer any question, regardless of how niche or obscure it is.

What sorts of questions should be asked to the respondents pulled from your sample?

There are specific questions that you should ask in order to get accurate responses from potential participants. There are also specific ways of asking these questions in order to make sure that you are getting data that is both relevant and useful.

For example, if you were trying to learn how to do market research, you would want to ask questions about what they like about your product or service, what they don’t like, when they purchase your product or service, where they purchase it from and if they would recommend it to someone else. This may seem like common sense. However, when conducting B2B market research, it is very easy for researchers to forget the importance of asking these simple questions because in larger companies there may be multiple departments working on different aspects of a project. When this happens, researchers focus so much on getting the information in the right format and covering all the complex subjects specific to the industry that they can lose track of smaller but equally important questions.